Re: [PATCH] maint: fix copyright dates that were munged by a maintenance script

[Jim Meyering]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> * gunzip.in, gzexe.in, zcat.in, zcmp.in, zdiff.in, zforce.in:
> * zgrep.in, zless.in, zmore.in, znew.in:
> A script went awry when updating copyright dates in gzip's shell
> scripts.  It should update comments to look like "# Copyright (C)
> 2007, 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc." (with a set of years)

Hi Paul,

I ran build-aux/update-copyright in 2009 and 2010.
Year ranges are now ok, with a caveat.  See below.
I prefer using ranges in comments, since they won't grow
longer until the year 10,000.

> and version messages to look like "Copyright (C) 2010 Free
> Software Foundation, Inc." (with just the most-recent year).

I'm inclined to update those scripts, putting $year in place of
the single year number there now.  With that, the script will
no longer update them, and all that remains is to automate
the once-per-year check to include those year definitions.

> Instead, it sometimes ignored one, sometimes the other, and
> typically put ranges into version messages.  Fix all this stuff by
> hand, using dates that I divined from the change logs (so they're
> a bit more accurate than script-generated dates).  We need to fix
> the script before it runs in 2011.

Perhaps you haven't seen this bit in README:

  For any copyright year range specified as YYYY-ZZZZ in this package
  note that the range specifies every single year in that closed interval.


Also relevant, here are some relatively new
guidelines from maintain.texi:

    ...
    It is recommended and simpler to add the new year to all files in the
    package, and be done with it for the rest of the year.

    ...
    You can use a range (@samp{2008-2010}) instead of listing individual
    years (@samp{2008, 2009, 2010}) if and only if: 1)@tie{}every year in
    the range, inclusive, really is a ``copyrightable'' year that would be
    listed individually; @emph{and} 2)@tie{}you make an explicit statement
    in a @file{README} file about this usage.